Natasha Alam gets ready for a naughty evening out

“It’s a very nudity-friendly show,” says Natasha Alam about True Blood, the randy vampire drama she stars in. “When my character’s introduced I’m tied to a dungeon ceiling, having kinky sex with my co-star Alexander Skarsgård.” As I’m sure you are all aware, Skarsgård plays Eric Northman, a 1,000-year-old vampire and former Viking who owns a strip club called Fangtasia. Alam plays Yvetta, one of his exotic dancers.

“I’ve been trying to get a part on the show since the pilot,” she says. “It’s a perfect role because I’m Eastern European and so is Yvetta. I took some poledancing classes a few years back and loved it. I can’t wait to see what they turn me into in season four.”

Getting naked isn’t a problem for actress and model Alam (see: July 2010’s Playboy) and during her FHM shoot we actually had to ask her to put some pants on. She says: “When I lived in Europe everyone would just lie on the beach topless and it’s no big deal, and when you’re a model you get changed backstage in front of everyone. It builds your resistance to nudity.”

Alam’s character in True Blood is human, but she played a vampire in 2008’s Twilight Shadow. “I was the lead lesbian vampire who has to go and rescue her girl from these bad vampires keeping her captive,” she says. “I get the girl and we kiss at the end. A typical lesbian vampire movie.”

Before that, she appeared in American dramas CSI, NYPD Blue, Nip/Tuck and Entourage. So far so groovy, but it wasn’t always. Alam’s an American citizen now, but grew up in Uzbekistan with Russian parents. She moved to Moscow and was there when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early ’90s and “had a lot of problems with local mafia”.

She says: “It was total chaos. At one point I was dating this amazing guy – good looking, successful, well educated, working at the embassy. Then all of a sudden he came with his buddy to my house, started terrorising us, brought a gun and started playing Russian roulette. It was a night of horror.”

Cue a move to Europe to model in Paris and Milan, then to London where she married Amir Ebrahim Pahlavi Alam, the grandson of a former Shah of Iran. They divorced after six years, but she kept his name and is technically still a princess. “Supposedly you keep the title until he remarries,” she says. “And that hasn’t happened yet.”

Now she lives in LA, determined to have a long and tremendous career. “I want to win an Oscar, act in period movies and action movies, maybe go back to London and do theatre in the West End,” she says. “I’m very ambitious. I grew up in a poor neighbourhood and my family couldn’t afford candy for Christmas, but now I feel like I can do or have anything if I put my mind to it.”